Time is at Hand! (eBook)

Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
135 Seiten
Temple Lodge Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-915776-18-1 (ISBN)

Infos

'The twenty-first century is the second, middle century of the three centuries of the present age of Michael, and it is the most decisive one. If humanity again misses Michael's goal, it will hardly be possible to recuperate from it, and human evolution will be derailed for a long time. The present age of Michael can therefore rightly be called 'the Apocalypse of the age of Michael'. - Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon In five lively, challenging lectures, Dr Ben-Aharon offers encouraging perspectives on the apocalyptic challenges facing humanity. The key Michaelic task for human beings today, he says, is to comprehend fully the new revelation of the etheric Christ. On the success of this depends humanity's resurrection from the abyss - from the grave of civilization. However, it can still be achieved, and the time is at hand! The author describes the global School of Spiritual Science's contemporary work to create a path to conscious recognition of the Christ and Michael impulses. Offering numerous fresh viewpoints into the trials of our time, The Time is at Hand! is an essential handbook for any serious student of anthroposophy. The talks (from 2017 and 2022) are titled: 'Ahrimanic Immortality, the Matrix and the Technological Singularity'; 'Michaelic Immortality'; 'The Two Apocalyptic Beasts and the Mystery of the Wound; 'Follow This Star'; and 'The Time is at Hand!'

DR YESHAYAHU (JESAIAH) BEN-AHARON - spiritual scientist, philosopher and social activist - is founder of the anthroposophical community in Harduf, Israel, co-founder of the Global Network for Social Threefolding, direc­tor of Global Event College and contributor to the School of Spiritual Science. He is the author of Cognitive Yoga, The Three Meetings, Jerusalem, The Twilight and Resurrec­tion of Humanity, Spiritual Science in the Twenty-First Century, The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century, The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, The New Experience of the Supersensible, America's Global Responsibility and Cognitive Yoga: How a Book is Born.

Textauszug

Lecture 2

Michaelic Immortality

Stuttgart, 4 November 2017

I wish to welcome the new people who have joined us tonight and also our School friends who are participating in the Matrix-Exploration event. This event about The Matrix has been organized by the faculty of the Global Event College, the leading group of the global School of Spiritual Science, whose main task is to research the Christ events of the twentieth and twenty-first century and to develop the tools to create the new community of Michael in our time.

To prepare the ground of our free etheric hearts for the lecture today, we can contemplate a statement of Rudolf Steiner in one of the morning discussions during the Christmas Foundation Conference. It can help us free our minds and hearts, feelings and will forces, from the burden and shackles of the past century, to realize that the true Time Spirit, Michael, is evolving positively all the time, and that we can unite with his stream and receive his inspirations, if we raise our etheric hearts to the etheric world, in the centre of which the revelation of the etheric Christ in this century is taking place.

I have often stressed amongst us that if you want to live in reality and not in ideas, then the realities of the time must be given particular recognition. The time in which one lives is a reality. But it is difficult to generate an understanding for this time as being something real. There are still people today who represent the threefolding of the social organism with the very sentences I used to use with regard to the conditions prevailing at the time, in 1919. History is indeed advancing so rapidly just now that if someone describes things in the way they were described in 1919 this seems to be hundreds of years out of date.19

This naturally applies to all aspects of the 100-year-old anthroposophy, about which people speak today in the same words that Rudolf Steiner used a century ago. Well, then, if four years were experienced by Rudolf Steiner in 1924 like hundreds of years, what would we have to say after an entire century has passed? How many thousands of years went by during the last century? And how far are we out of date? To be updated, in this sense, means to lift up and transform our traditional intellects, habitual minds, our norms of living and acting, that—to tell the truth—never even made it into the real time stream of the twentieth century, not to mention the twenty-first. We must plunge into the positive stream and evolution of time, the new human-earthly Sun stream of time, which since 1879 is the living body, soul and spirit of the Time Spirit, Michael, about which we shall speak today.

Yesterday we brought before us some quotations from the lectures that Rudolf Steiner gave 100 years ago about the ahrimanic plans for the twentieth century. Let me recap in a few words what we said yesterday. The ahrimanic plan has two main goals closely connected. The first is to materialize human life on earth to such an extent that when people die, they will not experience any difference between physical life and life after death. The human souls that are transformed by ever stronger materialistic influences, who pass their entire physical life without receiving any spiritual knowledge, feelings and practice, will remain after death, bound to the earth for longer periods of time, and if Ahriman achieves his ultimate goal, they will remain bound to the earth forever.

The other goal of Ahriman is to suppress the appearance of the etheric Christ in the etheric world that began in 1933. The goal of Ahriman is to ensure that the new Christ impulse will remain unperceived and unnoticed by humanity, and he accomplished this also with the help of the earthbound ahrimanized human souls. Rudolf Steiner pointed out in 1917 that the goal of Ahriman, is not only to suppress the reappearance of the etheric Christ, but also to usurp His sphere of life and give it over to a strong etheric ahrimanic being. The sphere of Christ’s etheric appearance that has been cleared for him by Michael and his hosts since 1879, which should have helped humans to receive the Christ consciously since the 30s and 40s of the last century, would instead be ruled by Ahriman and his beings. This is the ultimate reversal of human evolution: the replacement of the etheric Christ by an etheric ahrimanic being. And we had to say that according to our spiritual investigations, Ahriman greatly succeeded in achieving these goals in the course of the last century, and he will continue to attain his goals for the twenty-first century, if there is no opposition from the Michaelic side.

But what does it really mean that Ahriman replaced the etheric Christ with one of his etheric beings? We pointed out that in The Matrix trilogy you could see what a great advance Ahriman made in the last century due to this reversal, demonstrated by the fact that he could appropriate and copycat the highest human ideals of love and sacrifice, and indeed, reverse the meaning of the present Christ impulse, to portray ahrimanic immortality in the guise of human salvation. He showed brilliantly how humanity merges with his infinitely clever machine intelligence instead of with the etheric Christ. And when Neo merges with the mainframe of the ahrimanic power at the end of the third film, sacrificing himself to save humanity from the Matrix, if we are naive and romantics, and our spirituality is not grounded in the true understanding of reality, we would believe that he is following the Christ, not Ahriman! This is the meaning of Ahriman’s victory, replacing the Christ with his representative, and this is the deeper meaning of the project of ahrimanic immortality, accomplished with such tremendous success in the last century. This was described yesterday in connection with the further development of the ahrimanic Doppelgänger. Ahriman was actually enriched by the appropriated and reversed human forces; he developed himself and his subhuman kingdom further, because he could usurp forces of the human soul, which he could never possess before.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, Ahriman could only advance as far as controlling the human intellect, but since then he has been able to take over human feelings and will forces. He could do this because he took control of the freed forces of the etheric heart, which remained empty because the appearance of the etheric Christ was suppressed, and he filled them with ahrimanic forces. This was the real reason for Ahriman’s great satisfaction and jubilation at the end of last century, since he can now control and use not only the intellect, based mainly on the etheric and physical forces, but also even the soul forces of countless human souls bound to his kingdom. Ahriman can now strengthen his enslavement of humanity to his earth to a far greater extent than was possible when Rudolf Steiner warned in 1917 about his plans for the twentieth century. These are not mere conjectures, dear friends, but realities that one had to confront at the end of last century, in one’s struggles to break through these ahrimanic achievements, in order to bring the suppressed appearance of the etheric Christ to full consciousness, and unite once again with the present guidance of Michael.

To place these stark developments in the context of the struggles to resurrect the Michaelic stream in our time, I will share some aspects of my work since the end of the last century. I do this because in this case the personal is not only personal, but also has a universal human meaning, which each honestly striving person in our time can relate to and learn from. It will also shed some light on the subject of Michaelic immortality, as we shall see below.

At the end of the last century, I said to myself again and again: When I observe the above-described victories of Ahriman in the twentieth century, I experience some grave questions concerning the present situation of humanity. These questions filled my soul at the end of the last century. Especially the late 90s were a time of great inner struggles, because I clearly perceived that Rudolf Steiner’s worst predictions for the twentieth century had been fulfilled, and that humanity and anthroposophy with it were falling ever deeper into the ‘the grave of civilization’ as he called the situation of humanity at the end of the century, if the Michaelic movement failed to achieve its goals. True, I could, in my own quest for spiritual knowledge, find a way at the end of the century to the new Christ revelation and I could also, to a certain extent, describe it in my first books. But facing the situation of humanity and anthroposophy I realized how difficult it was going to be to introduce the Christ impulse into human knowledge and life, when Ahriman had established his kingdom so firmly and deeply. And indeed, when I tried to introduce this knowledge through my books and lectures at the end of the century, the opposition and hostility, especially in the Anthroposophical Society and movement, was truly formidable!

You could also say that the end of the century, from 1997 until 2001, was a very lonely path. As Rudolf Steiner predicted, this was the ‘time which the ahrimanic spirits wish to use most strongly…because human beings are so completely wrapped up in the intelligence that has come over them’.20 The new light dawning from the second century of the age of Michael and the third millennium could only be really perceived after the turn of the century. This happened at the same time when Ahriman celebrated his victory on a global scale, heralded by the fearful destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. He was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.4.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Esoterik / Spiritualität
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
• Themenwelt: Weitere Fachgebiete ► Anthroposophie
• ISBN-10: 1-915776-18-X / 191577618X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-915776-18-1 / 9781915776181